A Slow, Steady Siege on an ISIS Stronghold in Libya

SURT, Libya — Perched on a doorstep, the teenage Juma brothers whiled away the afternoon with a lazy game of checkers, pushing pebbles around a board chalked in the dust, seemingly oblivious to the crackle of gunfire and boom of artillery a few miles away.

They had fled their home in Surt, the Islamic State’s Libyan stronghold, three weeks earlier as a Libyan fighting force, quietly supported by American and British Special Operations troops, swept toward the coastal city from the desert. Now, as the siege intensified, the Juma brothers were sitting out the battle at this farmhouse on the southern edge of Surt, their apprehension tempered by a wave of sheer relief.

“Life was hell,” said Hammad, a lanky 16-year-old with a shock of unkempt hair, describing the Islamic State’s brutal 18-month rule. Cafes were closed, schools renamed and girls flogged for not covering their faces, he said. He watched in horror as a hooded figure chopped off the hand of a thief — a desperate man who had stolen medicine. Nightmares came after the Islamists crucified people accused of crimes at a major traffic junction, then left their bodies to rot.

“I would wake in a panic, thinking I was suffocating,” he said. His brother Mohammed, 19, nodded in agreement. The Islamists had executed his friend Abdullah by pushing him from a tall building, accusing him of blasphemy. Abdullah was 15 years old, Mohammed said.

The assault on Surt, now in its third week, has put the Islamic State in Libya under crushing pressure, threatening to rob the group of its largest base outside Iraq and Syria. The attack force, led by militias from the nearby city of Misurata and organized under the auspices of the United Nations-backed unity government, has corralled the Islamists into the city center, where they are pummeled with bombs and gunfire and cut off from their main escape route by sea.

The siege coincides with the Islamic State’s recent eviction from the Iraqi city of Falluja, and combined they are a heavy blow to the group’s territorial ambitions — even as it retaliates with devastating attacks against civilians. Turkish officials say they suspect the Islamic State of being responsible for the suicide bombings at the Istanbul airport on Tuesday that killed at least 41 people.

On the Front Line

The Surt offensive moved with breathtaking speed at first, shrinking the territory controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from 150 miles of coastline to barely four miles. But since the battle reached the densely defended streets of Surt, progress has been measured in yards, and the price in blood has risen sharply.

I arrived last week, with a photographer and a Libyan journalist who has worked for The New York Times since 2011. The first hurdle was bureaucratic: negotiating the maze of official permissions required to work in a country with three rival governments, and split by byzantine rivalries.

After acquiring the paperwork, and a commander willing to take us into the battle zone, we set off at night, speeding down a highway strewn with the charred remains of vehicles destroyed in suicide bombings.

Surt crackled with tension. We had arrived after the bloodiest day of fighting yet, in which 36 Libyan fighters had died and over 150 were injured in the latest push toward Islamic State lines. In all, over 800 men had been wounded since the fighting started, medics at the nearby field hospital said.

On the beach road, where artillery cases littered the empty street, fighters crouched under a berm of sand. Occasionally they leapt to their feet, spraying bullets toward Islamic State fighters in buildings more than 200 yards down the street.

The reply came in the form of a sharp crack, then the soft zip of a sniper’s bullet whistling overhead.

Video

On the Front Line Against ISIS in Libya

The Times reporter Declan Walsh captures the scene as fighters battling ISIS take cover from sniper fire and mortar rounds in Surt, Libya.

By DECLAN WALSH on Publish Date June 30, 2016.
Photo by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times.

Their commander was Mohammed Ahmed, a preternaturally calm man who, in T-shirt and flip-flops, seemed dressed more for the beach than a front line. He called orders into a walkie-talkie then pointed behind us, to a cluster of holiday villas where Libya’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, once housed visiting foreign dignitaries. Now it was raked with bullet holes and smeared with graffiti.

Capturing the villas, and a few hundred yards of road, cost the lives of four men, he said.

Circling drones overhead signaled the presence of small teams of American and British Special Operations forces that, according to Libyan officials, are using surveillance technology to provide targeting information to Libyan artillery spotters and their handful of aging warplanes.

Mediterranean Sea

Tripoli

TUNISIA

Misurata

Benghazi

Surt

Bin Jawad

ALGERIA

EGYPT

LIBYA

NIGER

CHAD

300 miles

JUNE 1, 2016

By The New York Times

“They tell the ground forces where to push and where to hold, and they coordinate the airstrikes,” said Mohamed Benrasali, a senior politician from Misurata.

That, so far, has been the extent of direct Western help on the battlefield, even as Libyan commanders appeal for more muscular assistance — ammunition, airstrikes and medical supplies.

“Here we are, fighting the West’s war against terrorism,” said Ibrahim Mustafa, 29, a commander, in a widely held view. “But although the West promises help, it never comes.”

The American officials and their allies counter that they must proceed cautiously, worried that such help could upset the precarious balance between Libya’s many factions and potentially inflaming a knotty civil conflict involving an array of outside countries.

Below the drones. the ground fight is a decidedly analogue affair. Many of the Libyan militiamen are part-time fighters armed with decades-old weapons. Their commanders scoff at Pentagon estimates of 6,500 Islamic State fighters in Libya — or a figure of 8,000, given by John Brennan, the director of the C.I.A., in testimony to Congress on June 20. The Libyans estimate that no more than 600 fighters are left in the city. But few doubt that the Islamic State fighters cornered in central Surt — mostly from Tunisia, Egypt and Sudan, according to anecdotal accounts, as well as a smaller number of Libyans — make a determined enemy.

At the beach front, a handful of fighters walked toward the sea, only to halt in their tracks: A barely visible line was pulled tautly across the sand, a mark of land mines laid in the night. The fighters retraced their steps, slowly, to the road.

Despite the fighting, the Islamic State radio station still broadcasts across Surt, offering a mixture of stuffy religious sermons and red-blooded threats against the group’s enemies. But predictions that Surt could become Raqqa on the Mediterranean, in a reference to the Islamic State headquarters in Syria, now look highly unlikely.

Surt has been the Islamic State’s Libyan stronghold, but a Libyan military force, quietly supported by American and British Special Operations troops, has swept toward it.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

As the Libyan fighters push deeper into Surt, the infrastructure of fear that helped the Islamic State exert a viselike grip is being dismantled. At the Zafran roundabout, the scaffolding where men in orange jumpsuits were once executed has been pulled down, and the Islamic State flag has been replaced by the Libyan national standard.

Retreating fighters have mustered at the Ouagadougou Center, a cavernous, marble-walled conference hall turned religious pulpit and weapons store. Their families cluster in an area called Dollar, with no water or electricity, former residents say.

Qaddafi’s Hopes for a City

For decades Surt was a byword for tribal cronyism in Libya. Colonel Qaddafi, who was born in a tent 10 miles south of the town, devised a series of vainglorious schemes intended to catapult the obscure city to global prominence. At one point he promoted it as the headquarters of a notional “United States of Africa.”

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Today those ideas have gone from ridiculous to tragic as the follies of the era — the luxury hotels and villas, the conference hall and the Great Man-Made River, a multibillion-dollar water project that Colonel Qaddafi hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world” — form a crumbling backdrop to Libya’s latest violent drama.

Colonel Qaddafi’s more enduring legacy is the paranoid factionalism that has pitted Libya’s politicians, fighters and towns, so viciously against one another since 2011, and that could yet endanger battlefield gains against the Islamic State.

A few miles behind the front lines, the commander leading the assault on Surt sat in a cramped room, before a radio transmitter and a large screen with a Google Earth map detailing the battlefield. It was the holy month of Ramadan, so most of his fighters were not eating during daylight hours. In the darkness of evening, after the fast had been broken, the commander lounged in the courtyard of his small compound, sucking on a water pipe, as he welcomed subordinates who huddled over maps, sipped sweet coffee and plotted the next day’s actions.

The commander agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity, citing fears that his family could be targeted in Islamic State attacks. He was at once welcoming and guarded — loudly echoing popular complaints about lack of Western support, but also making it clear that he considered Western intentions in Libya to be cynical.

Photo

Abu Bakr, 27, who is from Surt, was shot in the head during recent fighting. Two fighters beside him were killed, and Mr. Bakr still has bullet fragments in his brain that cannot be removed.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

“We’re sending our youth to die against terrorists, and Europe is playing football matches,” he said, referring to the soccer championship underway.

Surprisingly, he did not see the Islamic State as the greatest danger to Libya. Instead he expounded at length about the perfidy of Khalifa Hifter — the dominant military commander in eastern Libya, and a man widely viewed by many Misuratans as an enemy. The commander suggested that Mr. Hifter, in concert with a relative of Colonel Qaddafi’s based in Cairo, was secretly supporting the Islamic State — a theory given little credence by Western officials, but one that points to the deep suspicions that undergird every aspect of the Libyan society.

Mr. Hifter, for his part, also holds himself out as a warrior against Islamist extremists in the eastern cities of Benghazi and Derna. Last week he traveled to Moscow, requesting that the Kremlin provide him with weapons, Russian news media reported.

Such jostling has plagued efforts to bring Libya to peace since 2011, and helped the Islamic State move into Surt in 2014. Local clashes in recent weeks between rival groups near Tripoli and in Ajdabia, east of Surt, provide ominous signals of rising political as well as military tensions.

Although the unity government enjoys strong backing from the United Nations, the United States and many European countries, it has weak political authority and, on the ground in Surt, little respect. Instead, most fighters claimed to be fighting in the name of their town, their brigade, or their blood.

On the eastern front line, near the city port, Mohammed Haima peered down a pair of old military binoculars, one lens broken, toward the Islamic State lines a few hundred yards away.

The extremists had captured his brother, a fighter named Faisal, last summer, he said. He later learned, from a former prisoner, that Faisal had been tortured and had his fingernails pulled out.

Two months ago Islamists phoned Mr. Haima, offering to trade his brother for another prisoner. No deal was made. So now, Mr. Haima said, he was fighting to find his brother, or to avenge his death.

“Those terrorists are a cancer that needs to be wiped out,” he said. “They made my brother call me to prove he was alive. I’m going to find him for his sake — and for that of our mother.”

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Steady Siege Squeezes ISIS Stronghold in Libya. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe